freeware

While few keyboards have reached the high level of customization or the exorbitant price of the Optimus Maximus, not to be confused with Optimus Prime or Fortress Maximus, KeyboardLink is a great little open-source tool for turning your standard Windows keyboard into not just a program launcher, but also a program controller.

Compatible with Windows 2000, XP, 2003 Server, and Vista, and using a scant 3MB when in use, KeyboardLink gives you the power to set nearly any hot key combination for launching programs and controlling your media player.

To get started, once you've installed it, you need to … Read more

For the next three weeks, office workers across the country will have visions of buzzer-beaters dancing in their heads.

It's NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament time, and that means brackets will be zipping through e-mail systems in organizations large and small. There are dozens of sites that let you make your tournament choices online, whether to test your basketball-prediction acumen against the masses, or to recruit friends and coworkers in a private pool.

You can even use Google's Basketball Bracket Battle gadget to place your choices on your iGoogle page. After you select the "Create a bracket … Read more

Hunting down dastardly captcha hackers and spyware slimeballs is busy work, even for a man as talented as Power Downloader. Power doesn't have a lot of free time, so it's hard to remember to check all the Web sites that are important to him. His solution: instead of surfing a list of bookmarks, Power Downloader uses RSS feeds and FeedDemon to make the news and podcasts come to him.

FeedDemon is one of the best programs for managing your RSS collection. The interface is slick and easy to personalize, which is important since Power wasn't too impressed … Read more

One of the more useful tools that came with Internet Explorer 8 beta 1 was a toolbar button that easily switched between the beta and the previous stable iteration of the program, IE7. Nobody seems to have written a Firefox extension that does that--yet--but there are still several ways to have separate installations of Firefox 3 beta and the stable Firefox 2 on your computer, for both Mac and PC.

I covered one way Windows users can have dual installations back when FF3 beta 1 came out. Using PortableApps' Firefox 3 Portable beta 4, you can keep your Firefox 2 … Read more

Claiming a massive number of fixes, Mozilla has released Firefox 3 beta 4 (download for Windows and Mac). This version is more stable than previous FF3 betas, but it also showcases some of the more interesting new features that we'd been promised, but until now hadn't yet arrived.

Of the more than 900 changes and fixes, four of the most useful are the add-on finder, the full-page zoom, the one-click site info, and greater cross-platform integration. Extensions are handled the same way as in FF2: users can click on an XPI and it will automatically be saved to … Read more

I thought the social-network train had left me at the station. Sure, I've had a Facebook page for a couple of years, but I rarely use it. Same with the MySpace page I created back in 2006 as part of a story I was editing on how to get started with the service. I'm more active on LinkedIn because of the business focus of that network, though I usually visit the site only when I get an alert via e-mail about some new connection.

Why was I exhibiting such antisocial tendencies on the Internet? Was I doomed to … Read more

Creating your own PDFs used to require purchasing a PDF-creator like Adobe Acrobat. With PrimoPDF and doPDF, though, all that's required is a program with a print function. Interestingly, while both Do and Primo do the same thing, one is stripped-down and simple, while the other adds an extra step and some extra features to attract users.

DoPDF is the more basic of the two programs. It's utterly bereft of features beyond its main function: to let users create PDF documents from within any program using the native Print option. Along with whatever printer you've got hooked … Read more

In the long list of odious chores, defragmenting your hard drive is right up there with flossing your teeth and washing your dog--or flossing your dog's teeth, for that matter.

There is little agreement on how much--or even whether--defragmenting improves your PC's performance, but having files closer together on the disk reduces the amount of movement required by the drive's mechanical parts. This should make it last longer, though such factors as operating environment and the quality of its components probably have a greater impact on its life span.

Regardless of whether it will actually improve your … Read more

If you're looking for a fun and retro way to kill a few minutes this weekend, The Tetris Game offers up a simple freeware version of the classic game. There's no frills here, but anybody who's got a craving for that four-block goodness will probably find this rendition instantly satisfying.

The controls are mapped to your keyboard's arrow keys. Up rotates the piece, left and right shift it in one direction or another, and down accelerates the rate of descent. Pieces come in red, green, gray, yellow, and blue. You can save your high scores or … Read more